Comedian John Bishop has admitted that he regrets how he coped with his son going deaf as a teenager.
John's lookalike son Joe, 27, started to lose his hearing at 15 due to an autoimmune disease.
Looking back on Joe's early diagnosis, John admitted that he didn't quite know how to deal with his son's life-changing condition.
"I can't get back the lost years where maybe I wasn't handling it properly, but hopefully we can move on from here," the proud dad said in his eye-opening documentary, John & Joe Bishop: Life After Deaf.
"As a parent, there still isn't a single day where I wouldn't swap places with him."
In the ITV documentary the Liverpool native father and son duo embark on a journey to embrace their personal connection to deafness after Joe began losing his hearing as a teenager.
The pair set out to find out more about the deaf community and the show also sees John attempting to deliver an entire signed stand-up comedy gig to a deaf audience.
Speaking about the personal documentary, John told his Instagram followers that the show 'is the hardest piece of television I have ever made'.
"It's started out as a documentary about me learning sign language to do stand-up and turned instead to a healing process for me and my family, which we never expected and which is still ongoing," he explained.
Joe lives with an autoimmune condition that causes progressive deafness and is now partially deaf because of the condition.
The condition developed when Joe was a teenager after he contracted a virus that destroyed most of his hearing at the age of 15.
For the past 12 years the Bishop family have been trying to 'fix' Joe's hearing, however the new documentary sees the family now reconsider their stance, instead looking to 'embrace' Joe's deafness.
The father and son duo meet people from the deaf community who relate to facing miscommunication and misunderstanding but also offer alternative perspectives on what it means to be deaf in the eye-opening documentary.
In the first step towards this, the father and son have been learning British Sign Language together.
Joe & John Bishop: Life After Deaf is available to view on ITV Hub now.
